Posts Tagged ‘fishing cactus’

This year again, we have been to Gamescom. This time was quite different thanks to the fact that we were part of the awesome Indie Booth Arena, which is the best place to meet other indies and play wonderful uncommon games.

It was also the first time that Epistorywas showcasted during a public event since its release in March 2016. And guess what? People liked it! Some players, even told us that Epistory was the best game presented at Gamescom this year. What a compliment!

Like every year, we met some wonderful people: some new and some who knew us from last Gamescom. Hope, we’ll meet again next year.

This article shows the difficulty of maintaining Art Direction consistency on a project when its scope and visual quality suddenly increase during production!

First, we’ll explain the assets creation guidelines we decided at the beginning of the project. Then we’ll see how quality problems emerged as the production budget increased, and how we dealt with them!

Art constraints for small budget

When we started the production of Epistory (codenamed “The heroine of no tale” in those ancient times), the sales expectations were quite low because we thought we were targeting the niche of typing games. We already wanted a unique art direction, made of unfolding environments and paper-crafted items, but the budget constraints made us humble concerning the visual quality of each asset. So we ended up with those production guidelines to create game assets :

Simple geometry

All assets using the same multi-usage shader

No complicated texture mapping (basic planar UVs)

No unique texture per asset, only generic colored patches gathered in a few textures

Despite our small budget, all those assets put together created a simple but pretty cool look :

Those constraints made us 3D artists sad but it should have allowed us to make all assets and environments in time for the game release, so we were quite happy with it! But that was before we started communicating on the game…

Change of scope

The art team was producing the first levels of the game, and we started to spread some images and videos, building the community. At that point we understood that something was happening, youtubers were talking about our game, forums and conventions gave us very positive feedbacks. Our little typing game was becoming pretty popular, people were really loving it! The first round of Early Access conforted the first impression. As thousands of people added “Epistory: Typing Chronicles” into their steam wishlist, we realized that instead of making a funny but small scoped typing game, we could scale things up. We decided to transform it into a unique story driven adventure game, with lots of dungeons, collectibles, a scenario written by a real professional writer, and even give a voice to the narrator.

As the deadlines were pushed to 2016, the art team jumped at the chance to put more visual quality into the game!

New quality standards

We wanted to make the most of this extra production time, and we put more details into the new assets, so we basically took the opposite of what we were doing until now:

More interesting paper-like shapes for the geometry

More and more complicated shaders

Clean unfolded texture mapping coordinates

Unique textures per asset (or one texture for the same group of assets)

A subtle but efficient vertical gradient (the base of the asset is darker than its top)

With unique texture coordinates, we could paint paper folds, and add details like hand painted highlights on the edges and Ambient Occlusion (darker color at the junction between surfaces)

On those two images it’s easy to spot the quality gap. You can notice the polished shapes and the greater work made into the textures, which add a lot of depth and details to the assets :

The production time was obviously far longer than the old technique, because for EACH game asset, we had to unfold clean texture coordinates, calculate the Ambient Occlusion pass, calculate the vertical gradient, paint the edges highlights and details into the texture,…

We also put extra time to the environments creation process by adding an “artist layout pass” to polish each dungeon, and by working more on the lighting setups and effects. And the overall visual impact was far better than before!

The problem was that we quickly found out that the “old” assets looked dull compared to the new ones, but we couldn’t afford redesigning all of them…

Assets wars

With each new asset being prettier than the last, we soon spotted a problem in the consistency of the art direction and assets quality !

There was too much difference between the old “flat” assets and the new “detailed” ones :

Unfortunately the budget was not so big that we could afford redoing all the former game assets to match the final style!

That unexpected constraint gave us the idea of showing a progression in the art style through the game, and we implemented a chronological progression into the overall papercraft quality of the adventure. That is to say the first part of the game is made of more basic shapes, and the quality of the papercraft technique evolves to be more and more noticeable as we progress into the game, following the steps of humanity evolution:

1- At the beginning, as the world unfolds for the first time, you will see the “basic” objects in the “nature” theme

2- Next, in the first dungeon you will be able to spot some prehistoric assets, made of archaic papercraft assets

3- As you continue your journey through human evolution, papercraft techniques evolves to show ancient civilizations

4- Later, you will travel through complex origami buildings, and much more, but we won’t spoil you the pleasure of discovering it in the game!

We managed to add a real meaning to this papercraft evolution, but still we decided to redesign several old assets to match the quality gap. We’ve done this only for the assets we could see all over the adventure. Moreover, by doing those important assets prettier, they would be easily noticeable at the beginning of the game, where the assets are simpler, and better integrated in later dungeons, where the assets are polished.

The combat, exploration and teleporter tiles redone from scratch:

The conclusion of this article could be that it’s far better to know the scope/budget BEFORE beginning the production process! If the scope suddenly increases, you will have to choose between more content or more quality, but keep in mind that most of the time you will not be able to use a trick like we did, and you will end up redoing all of your assets from scratch! And as artists will always tend to increase quality if you give them extra time, do not forget to keep an eye on them!

Hi Fox Riders! The moment has come to announce that Epistory – Typing Chronicles will leave early access and be released on Steam on the 30th of March 2016. We are so enthousiastic and we can’t wait to read your feedback about the last chapters of the game. So, if the game isn’t yet in your Steam library, it’s you last chance to get it at the Early Access price! As a bonus, find below some screenshots of the upcoming chapters and a short teaser made with love. See you on the community hub!

Update: We didn’t make it but we’d like to thanks all the people who voted for Epistory. Next year you’ll do it!

Hi Folks,

It’s the 6th Annual Indie of the Year Awards, a celebration of this year finest indie games chosen by indies fans. If you could give us a hand and vote for Epistory on IndieDB it would be great. The top 100 will be announced on the 11th of December. Let’s do our best!

As promised, Epistory – Typing Chronicles is now available on Linux and Mac! If you encounter any bugs please give us a heads up and we’ll fix them as soon as possible.

The challengers amongst you will be pleased to find the new “Arena” mode in the main menu. It’s a special place where the world will finally recognize the value of your typing skills. We’re still working on the leaderboard that should come soon. It’s also a bit rough around the edges.

Note that Spanish language has been added to the game. More languages to come during the Early Access.

Here’s the patch note for the new version:

New Features

Added: Infinite Battle “Arena” mode, where you’ll soon be able to challenge yourself and get your name at the top of the leaderboard.

Added: Linux version

Added: Mac version

Added: Spanish version

And plenty of stuff behind the scene for the upcoming Chapter 2…

Various improvements

Removed magic effect on enemies’ last word.

Special characters are displayed when the required magic is locked.

Reworked “Burning Hollow” level design.

Reworked story in “Forgotten Forest“.

Bug fix

Fixed: typing the word while it moves result in some letters not colored properly.

Fixed: avatar moving using the last letter of a word typed if the typing mode auto switch is triggered.

Fixed: auto typing mode switch was not happening if an untypeable (fire) word was displayed

Epistory needs to establish a subtle, layered narrative voice within its opening moments. Join the game’s writer in a deep exploration of why this story is harder to begin than most.

Wether you’re writing a game, or a movie, or a novel: it’s always difficult to start a story. There’s just so much riding on those opening moments. This difficulty is basically the premise for Epistory’s plot, in which a struggling writer is trying to start a novel. The player assumes the role of the muse, helping the story come to life.

Epistory adds an additional complication: as well as attracting the player’s interest immediately, it must also establish the narrative voice. In this article, I’ll be explaining more about what this means and how I’ve tried to solve the problem.

What’s In A Voice?By ‘narrative voice’, I simply mean the voice of the narrator: who is telling the story? Why? And in what context? Are they speaking to the audience directly? Are they writing a letter? Is the audience an active party in the story, or are it given a camera’s eye view into someone else’s world? Ultimately, narrative voice defines the relationship between the storyteller and the audience.

Most narrative voice is established by its medium and a few quickly-gleaned implications. When a written story starts with a line like “Call me Ishmael” (a laMoby Dick), we instantly understand that there is a person telling the story to the reader. We understand that the narrator has their old world view, and agenda, and feelings. But when we watch a film and a camera sweeps across the Earth – like no human can do – we understand that a picture of the world is being presented to us impartially. We are invited to watch through a window.

Whose Voice Is It Anyway?In Epistory, the narrative voice comes from a writer who we never see. All the words of narration – from the introductory sequence to the writing stretched over the levels – are the words this writer has written in their novel. The player’s goal is to help the writer create the story: typing words and discovering things to encourage the author’s inspiration.This is a very hard thing to explain in-game: not least because we don’t meet the writer. We have to inferher presence. Originally, the game’s script did this the obvious way: it begins with a writer saying “I hate writer’s block! How am I ever going to write this story?”, and quickly settles down into the story itself, “She looked like a lost little girl”. This establishes the narration as the writer’s voice and ensures it makes sense within the context of the game.This works – but it’s messy because it creates two distinct narrative voices. The author’s (“I hate writer’s block!”) and the story’s (“She looked like a lost little girl”). Because we don’t really know which is which, we have to infer every time – and so there’s a constant dissonance. It’s hard to know who is telling the story. Also, writers tend not to ask themselves questions in their own prose, so the voice may not sound authentic to player.

A New VoiceI wanted to try and do something a bit more subtle and seamless: using a single voice that represents all the narration. I’ve tried to do this by presenting the story as a work-in-progress and showing the writer’s edits. The theory runs like this:The game begins on a black, foggy screen. A blank canvas. Then some text appears: “Once upon a time”. This is how all fairy stories start, right? The player knows that a story is beginning. But the text is quickly erased character-by-character. The story has changed, the writer’s hand is revealed by implication.The writer tries again, and this time she writes: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. This is how Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities - the best-selling novel of all time – begins. Even if the player doesn’t follow the reference (and most won’t!), they should understand that the story has been restarted.But this beginning is rejected too, and so it is also erased. The pattern has been established now: the author doesn’t know how to start the story. So, third time lucky, the narrative begins in earnest: “There was a girl. And she rode on the back of a great fox.”. And hey presto – the fog clears to reveal the player-character.

Voice of ReasonBecause there is only one narrative voice, the player can trust that it represents the words of a story being written around their actions. We build on this start by adding more interactions which make the player aware of the author – and vice versa – by changing text as the player interacts with the world. It’s a subtle idea, and maybe not everyone will get it. I expect most people won’t be able to articulate it. But subconsciously, I believe people will understand that a story is being written around them by an unseen author.

Successful execution relies on two things: using recognisable (or cliched) opening lines, so that the player understands what the writer is trying to achieve (ie, the beginning of a story); and a character deletion effect, so that the player is aware that the writer is deliberately erasing and rewriting text. Sound effects can help reinforce the idea of writing and erasing, too.

This, however, is not the whole story. While we work hard to establish and contextualise the narrator’s voice early in the game – we later sow in a few seeds of dissonance. Because in Epistory, not all is what it seems…

The Trouble With Tiles

All of Epistory’s levels start as an isometric RPG in Tiled (as explained in this prior article). This is a great foundation to build on – but it brings some technical limitations which we have to deal with. For example, we have to respect the TiledToUnity plugin rule that each tile must be a square of equal size. It doesn’t help that any tile rotation must be done as a duplicate tile instead of a random effect.

As a result of this, the tiles use to build each level stand out too clearly. We can see the seams, the joins, the patterns. The effect is fatal to immersion within the game world.

This old screenshot illustrates the problem nicely. Each tile is the same as the previous one, creating a very obvious pattern. This is just a small example – sometimes the whole screen will have the same tile, interrupted only by the occasional prop or decoration.

In this article, I will guide you through the steps we used to break this ugly pattern and improve the overall look of the ground tiles, which currently look like the screenshot below. It’s unlikely that we will change the tile’s look again – but you never know.

Start at the Start

If it sounds obvious, it’s probably because it is! Rotating each tile will help make it look different and vary the seams created where they join.

We started by rotating our tiles randomly with an editor script. Since our goal in art direction was to create a hand-made paper world, we decided early on that a tile would be considered an independent square of paper. Based on this fact, we agreed that imperfect tiling between two tiles was acceptable: meaning that rotation gives us variation. The result was better but still a bit jarring.

Lean Towards the Abnormal

Because each tile is supposed to be a piece of paper, it’s hard (not to mention expensive) to make each one visually unique. We aimed to solve this by dynamically changing the normal map on each individual tile.

A normal map is a 2D image used to replace or modify the normals of a 3D surface. Because our tile models are mostly flat, we use normal maps and lighting to give them some paper-looking wrinkles.

Here’s how we modified our ground shader in Shader Forge:

world position.

a parameter which allow us to tweak how much a change in world position affects the overall look.

division.

frac. It takes only the fractional part of the input. Effectively producing a value from 0 to 1, based on the world position.

append allows us to create a vector 2 (UV in our case).

normal map sampling.

normal blending. You cannot blend normals the same way you blend colors so we use a custom formula.

The effect of this is that instead of having one normal map per tile and limited to its bounds, we have two normals, whose UVs will depend on their world position. This effectively spans (and repeats across) the whole level. If you look carefully you can see that one of them will have U & V depending on the positions X & Z while the other will map U & V to Z & X. This “crisscross” allows us to have very different looking tiles each time, instead of having the pattern being simply repeated less often.

If you want a more visual way of understanding this, you can see it in the editor view. We created a gif but it was too heavy to be posted inline. You can find it here.

You can see that when I move the tiles, the normal on top of it doesn’t move. The apparent seam on the normal is a result of the tile rotation around Y.

As a bonus, we also added a detail texture. It’s a common technique so I won’t explain it here – but here’s the shader forge screenshot:

Perfect Imperfections

This was the first time I did major shader work and it turned out quite well in my opinion. With the current art direction we had to improvise a bit – but we successfully fixed the tiling problem with no rework on the assets. This results in a seamless, believable game world.

For the next few days we will focuson ironing out the bugs and quirks that were reported. Most notably any save bug that you or we encounter. The game is currently playable in several settings but the save is sometimes a bit dodgy so that is our top priority.

Then, in the coming weeks, we will continue to produce the next chapter of the game. We should be able to deliver it in a month. A month and a half, maximum.

We will of course do minor content release in between chapters with stuff like improved UI and feedback, bug fixes & general polish. We want to avoid players going through a new chapter while it’s only half done because it will ruin part of the joy of discovery.

We are also going to create an unstable branch for the game so you can try our latest advancements before we make it available for everyone. We may also add a separate branch for people wanting to try the new areas before they are finished if you ask for it.